Typical solid state drive (SSD) manufacturing process begins with surface-mount technology (SMT) mounting of electronic components on the printed circuit (PC) board(s). Each PC board is then board-level verified by “interconnection testing” using techniques such as in-circuit test (ICT) or flying probe testing, before the subassemblies are assemble into a drive. Such a drive is typically in the form of a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) Card Edge or a small form factor (SFF) “drive”.
Once the drive is assembled, the drive needs to be initialized before board-level testing can begin at the factory. An “out of band” interface, not dependent on the device's firmware, is typically used to initialize the drive at the factory. A typical ‘out of band” interface used for the initialization is a universal asynchronous receiver/transceiver (UART) or a high-speed serial interface (HSSI), having a speed that is typically between 19.2 kbps to 1 Mbps).
In a full system slot (e.g., where the drive sits in a fully functional environment and expected to operate fully, including the standard product interface, and host software stack), firmware is typically required to use the standard product interface, such as serial attached small computer system interface (SAS), serial advanced technology attachment (SATA), or PCIe.